Dvojitá negace nene- v češtině

Abstract

The paper deals, from a diachronic perspective, with the double negative prefix nene-. This type of negation has received almost no attention in Czech linguistics so far. The study aims to collect a large number of examples. A total of 4,874 occurrences of this type of negation were excerpted from selected Czech dictionaries, written language corpora, the Lexical Database of Humanistic and Baroque Czech, and the Kramerius digital library (version 5). This type of negation occurred most frequently with verbs, with the most common word being nenedostávat(i) se (‘neg-neg-get’, i.e. ‘to not not get’). The first documented occurrence dates to the 14th century, and in the second half of the 20th century, this type of negation began to disappear from printed texts. The analysis shows that the meaning of words with the prefix nene- can usually be interpreted as a simple affirmative meaning, though sometimes with a shift toward an intensification of degree. This study contributes to the understanding of negation in Czech and provides suggestions for further analysis.